The Queen has met survivors and liberators of Bergen-Belsen on her first ever visit to the site of a Nazi concentration camp.
Accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen laid a wreath at a memorial to the 70,000 Jews, Russians and other prisoners who died at the place where the Nazis committed “the ultimate blasphemy”.
The cheers and applause that have accompanied the Queen every step of the way during her four-day State visit to Germany were replaced by silence at a patch of land where evil once settled.
She and the Duke stood in quiet contemplation by the grass mounds covering mass graves which hold the remains of up to 5,000 people each.
They also paused by a gravestone erected in memory of Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who, with her her sister Margot, died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In common with gravestones put up by individual families, it does not mark the precise location of her burial place; like every other victim of Bergen-Belsen, her body lies among the jumbled remains which were bulldozed into the giant pits by the thousand.
Bergen-Belsen was the only concentration camp to be liberated by the British, who arrived on April 15, 1945, to scenes of horror that shocked the watching world. Its name became synonymous with the atrocities of the Holocaust after newsreel footage, narrated by BBC war reporter Richard Dimbleby, was shown in the Allied nations.
The Queen and the Duke spent parts of their visit walking through the Memorial Grounds that stand on the site of the camp, unaccompanied by any aides. At one point they stopped together inside the House of Silence, a space for quiet contemplation.
They then laid a wreath together on the Inscription Wall, which has messages from many of the nations whose citizens died there. Their tribute was placed next to a message in English, which reads: “To the memory of all those who died in this place.”
Among the British liberators who arrived that day was Capt Eric “Winkle” Brown, the legendary Royal Navy test pilot who was asked to interrogate the camp commandant because of his ability to speak German.
Now aged 96, he returned to the camp to meet the Queen. He said of his wartime experience: “It was utterly, utterly horrific. Firstly there were 10,000 bodies littered around, and the worst thing to me was that the [survivors] had been dehumanised. They were like animals because they would urinate and defecate wherever they were. They had lost all dignity, they were dying, none of them looked as if they would live.
“Some of the bodies had been thrown into open graves but most were just lying around. There were pits 10ft deep which had bodies piled 10ft high in them, mostly women. There were bodies literally everywhere.
“Worse was to come because when we walked into the huts they had tripled bunk beds in them, with as many as seven people in each triple bunk. The ones in the top bunks messed on the ones below, and they messed on the ones below them. The stench was utterly, utterly appalling.
“There were some people walking around, I spoke to them in German but they would stand staring at the ground, it didn’t seem to register and as soon as I stopped talking they just shuffled on. It was a dreadful, dreadful place to be.”
He has returned several times since, and said: “The thing that always strikes me is that when you get here, there is a clammy feeling, it almost envelops you. There’s not a bird in sight – and you’re in a forest – the birds have abandoned it and there is the pall of death everywhere.
“I still wake up the odd morning and the stench of Belsen is in my nostrils. It’s the stench that stays with me. God that smell was fearsome.”
Bergen-Belsen was, at first, an “exchange” camp, where prisoners who the Germans thought might be swapped for German prisoners of war were held. But in 1944, as the Russian army swept across Poland and death camps such as Auschwitz were overrun, the prisoners were transferred to Belsen, which became so overcrowded that malnutrition and disease took hold.
Among the survivors of Bergen-Belsen who met the Queen was Rudi Oppenheimer, 83, whose Jewish family were rounded up in Amsterdam and arrived at the camp in February 1944. Both of his parents died there.
He said: “People who came from Auschwitz said the conditions at Belsen were worse than at Auschwitz.
“Things were really bad. Corpses were lying all over the place, we were too weak to move them and I suppose that they had already started to dig pits. There was a crematorium that could take two people at a time but there were so many bodies it was’t enough. The bodies were always naked because people would take their clothes to wear.
“The food was a mug of brown water in the morning and in the evening, 4cm of bread. If you were lucky you got a litre of turnip soup at lunchtime, but usually we were spending 10 hours a day standing on the parade ground so they could count people.
“I remember visiting my parents in the hostel barracks when they were ill and that was terrible. Those people never went to the loo, it all went into the mattress which was just a straw sack, and when someone died the next person would just be put on there. We were just animals I suppose.
“When my parents died they were lying in the barracks and we just looked at them. They never said goodbye to us, they must have known they were dying but didn’t want to upset us.”
Mr Oppenheimer, who now lives in London, erected a tombstone to his parents Hans and Rika at Belsen in the 1990s. He has visited the site about 18 times over the years.
“I am always very keen to light my candle on my parents’ gravestone when I am there, to show my parents I haven’t forgotten them,” he said. “I feel very sad when I am standing in front of that tombstone and I see their names. It’s very unfair, they died so young, they were just 42.
“I am lucky because I survived and I was able to put up a gravestone in my parents’ memory, but so many people didn’t survive and no-one remembers them.”
He said he was “thrilled” by the Queen’s visit, adding: “She is the head of the Army, they liberated the camp and they looked after all the inmates. Some of the British soldiers died from typhus as a result and it is important for her to honour them.”
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 89, a Jew born in Breslau in what is now Poland, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 because she was travelling with forged papers.
After spells in prison and in Auschwitz, she arrived in Belsen in October 1944.
Asked what it was like to live in Belsen, she said: “It was more like dying there, not living there.
“There was nothing, it was the end, there was no food, nothing. The only reason anyone survived was because the British came in time.
“When the British came it was a miracle, we thought we were dreaming, suddenly we heard an English voice.”
Praising the Queen’s visit, she said: “The memories of Belsen will certainly fade – there are a lot of horrible things happening now – but it’s important for those memories to stay alive.”
Barely anything now remains of the buildings that made up Bergen-Belsen, which were burned to the ground by the British to eradicate the typhus and other diseases that were rife there, and which claimed almost 14,000 lives after it was liberated.
Michael Bentine, the Goon Show comedian who was among the British liberators, said he always regarded the events that took place at Belsen as “the ultimate blasphemy”.
Karen Pollock MBE, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust said: “The survivors of Bergen-Belsen will never forget being liberated by British forces after the years of mistreatment they suffered there at the hands of the Nazis. Her Majesty’s visit is particularly poignant in this anniversary year – 70 years after the liberation of the camp and will mean so much to the survivors and liberators who are still with us.”